Among wireless communication technologies, a wireless fidelity (hereinafter referred to ‘Wi-Fi’) direct network technology is a technology which enables Wi-Fi terminals to be connected to each other in a peer-to-peer (hereinafter referred to as ‘P2P’) fashion without an AP being a medium of an infrastructure network. Most of existing Wi-Fi technologies are aimed at only connecting with Internet through a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) AP, consideration of direct communication between terminals is insufficient. Direct communication between terminals may be achieved by a Bluetooth technology. However, performances in transmission distance and transmission speed sides of the Bluetooth technology is deteriorated as compared with the Wi-Fi Direct technology.
An existing Wi-Fi technology supports a mode in which direct communication between terminals is possible, which called an Ad-hoc mode. However, since the Ad-hoc mode is disadvantageous in that supplement is weak, power consumption is high, and throughput is limited to 11 Mbps, it is hardly used in actuality.
The Wi-Fi direct technology supports Wi-Fi Protected Access® 2 (WPA2) to supplement weakness of security. Further, the Wi-Fi Direct technology supports simple connection between terminals using a Wi-Fi Simple Configuration (hereinafter referred to ‘WSC’). Moreover, the Wi-Fi direct technology provides an improved power consumption algorithm by supporting IEEE 802.1 in to significantly improve throughput as compared with the Ad-hoc mode.
The Wi-Fi direct technology is a protocol manufactured based on IEEE 802.11, and is compatible with a legacy client. The Wi-Fi direct technology may be upgraded in a terminal without changing hardware.
Although the Wi-Fi direct technology has considerable advantages as illustrated above as compared with the Bluetooth and the Ad-hoc technology, there is a need for improvement in connection speed between terminals. The terminals perform an IP address allocation procedure after connection between the terminals is completed. That is, since the IP address allocation procedure is further performed after the connection between the terminals is completed, there is a limitation on improvement in connection speed. In particular, when one of the terminals is determined as a Group Owner (hereinafter referred to ‘GO’), a corresponding terminal performs an AP function. That is, the GO drives a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (hereinafter referred to ‘DHCP’) server to allocate an IP address to another terminal, namely, a group client (hereinafter referred to ‘GC’).